Kill

I’ve finally just walked away from the demo booth. It’s screwed. Anyone within range of it when it detonates will be taken with. Ka-boom.

The conversation at the time that I left was between Apple and the hotel “engineers” over the fact that we need two independent 20 amp circuits to power our booth. Not two extension cords from the same outlet. Not an extension cord with a power strip. Two. Independent. Reality is that our booth draws about 18 amps at peak. One is plenty. We do this all the time. However, in Detroit, our booth pops the supposedly 20 amp circuit. Fine. I’m not arguing about whether it’s 15 or 20. Just bring me two of those 20s you have. We’ll manually load balance them. Thanks. Oh, and screw your union rules. This is my screwdriver.

The best part was when we were digging through the cables and found a hand made 20 to 15 amp adaptor. Like, a three prong wall outlet wrapped up in electrical tape with two wires coming out of it, and a three prong plug taped to it. Tape. Two wires. Ground? Bah. Ground is for the weak. My cluster, however, was weak. Thank god for the UPS.

I’ve been having fun blowing out the power on command. They get something that they claim will work, and then I run a big, 8-way processing job with lots of disk I/O. Blammo. One time, we smelled smoke. Wheeee.

The other cluster I was supposed to build? Ha. We turned on the machines to give the appearance of utility (blinkenlights), and he’s connected by remote to his home system. What a cluster-fuck. He got bitten by the fact that no machine in this hotel is allowed to connect directly to any other machine in this hotel. If I go out to the corporate servers in Cambridge, and tunnel back in, that’s fine. So, his demo machines couldn’t talk to his demo cluster. I told him that the other option was to rewire his whole demo network to all be on a private subnet. He decided to take his running demo and run with it. I don’t blame him.

Oh yeah, going to the technical sessions? Ha. Going to see my family in the area? Double ha.

The ren center, by the way, is the worst designed building EVER. To get from the first floor to the fifth floor, you must either (a) complete one entire trip around the building to use the escalators which are stylishly offset from each other (b) use TWO distinct elevators. One in the lobby and another on the third floor.

I think I’ll post this before the wireless dies again.